The Story of Kullervo

Tolkien, Kalevala, and ‘The Story of Kullervo’

The Story of Kullervo was an essential step on Tolkien’s road from adaptation to invention that resulted in the ‘Silmarillion’. It was the forerunner to and inspiration for his tragic epic of Túrin Turambar, one of the three ‘Great Tales’ of the fictive mythology of Middle-earth. Without the story itself to fit into the sequence, we have had only the beginning (Kalevala) and the end (Túrin) of the process, but not the crucial middle portion.

Humphrey Carpenter’s declaration in J.R.R. Tolkien: a biography, that episodes in Tolkien’s tale of Túrin Turambar were ‘derived quite consciously from the story of Kullervo in the Kalevala’ (J.R.R. Tolkien: a biography, p. 96), is correct, yet seems in conflict with his judgment in the same paragraph that the influence of Kalevala on the Túrin story was ‘only superficial’ (ibid., p. 96). In fact, this judgment, like Carpenter’s misplacement of Tolkien’s ‘something of the same sort’ comment (see note^{5}), is quite off the mark. Far from being a superficial influence on Túrin, Kullervo’s story in Kalevala had a profound effect and was the root and source of the story, though filtered through Tolkien’s own (at that time unknown) adaptation. Carpenter’s biography was published in the same year — 1977 — as Christopher Tolkien’s edition of The Silmarillion, which gave readers their first look at the saga of Túrin and enabled them to compare it with the Kullervo story in Kalevala.

One of the earliest scholars^{6} to seize the opportunity for comparison was Randel Helms, whose 1981 Tolkien and the Silmarils suggested that the story in Kalevala ‘is a tale that begs to be transformed’. But without access to The Story of Kullervo, Helms could only see Tolkien ‘learning to outgrow an influence, transform a source’, from the ‘lustful and murderous’ Kullervo of Kalevala (Helms, p. 6) to the lovable but wayward and wrong-headed Túrin Turambar of his own legendarium. Interest in Kullervo as a source thus grew slowly, with the critical commentary of necessity overleaping the unpublished story to jump straight from Kalevala to The Silmarillion. The predictable result was that even so distinguished a Tolkien scholar as Tom Shippey could concede that ‘the basic outline of the tale (of Túrin) owes much to the “Story of Kullervo” in the Kalevala’ (The Road to Middle-earth, p. 297), note the likenesses in ruined family, fosterage, incest with a sister, the conversation with the sword, and stop there.

The pace picked up as the 20th century turned to the 21st. Charles Noad conceded that ‘insofar as Kullervo served as the germ for Túrin, this was in one sense the beginning of the legendarium, but only as a model for future work’ (Tolkien’s Legendarium, p. 35). Given the lack of additional evidence, that, perforce, was all that scholars could conclude. Richard West, in general agreement with Carpenter and Helms, observed that ‘the story of Túrin did not remain a retelling of the story of Kullervo’, adding that ‘if we had the earliest version we would undoubtedly see that Tolkien started out that way, as he said, but at some point he diverged to tell a new story in the old tradition’ (ibid., 238). In her much later article, ‘Identifying England’s Lönnrot’ (Tolkien Studies I, 2004, 69–84), Anne Petty compared Tolkien with Elias Lönnrot, the compiler of Kalevala, calling attention to the way in which both mythmakers drew on earlier sources in applying their own organization and textualization to the story elements, Lönnrot’s sources being actual rune-singers as well as earlier folklore collectors, and Tolkien’s limited (as far as she knew) to the invented bards, scribes, and translators within his fiction. What Helms and Shippey and West and Petty lacked access to was the extra-mythological, transitional story and transitional character that contributed substantially to the transformation.

The appearance in 1981 of The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien gave us more information but little clarification, for the letters sent mixed signals, or at least showed Tolkien’s mixed feelings about the relative importance of Kalevala to his own mythology. His disclaimer that, as ‘The Children of Húrin’, the Kullervo story was ‘entirely changed except in the tragic ending’ (Letters, p. 345) probably influenced Carpenter’s ‘only superficial’ comment. But while it is understandable that Tolkien would want to privilege his own invention and establish his story’s independence from its source, other more positive references to Kalevala in his letters give a different impression. The mythology ‘greatly affected’ him (144); the language was like ‘an amazing wine’ (214); ‘Finnish nearly ruined [his] Hon. Mods.’ (87); Kalevala ‘set the rocket off in story’ (214); it was ‘the original germ of the Silmarillion’ (87). There is no question that Túrin Turambar is a fully realized character in his own right, far richer and better developed than the Kullervo of Kalevala, and situated in an entirely different context. In that respect, it could truthfully be said that the story was ‘entirely changed’. But an essential step was omitted. The figure of Kullervo passed through a formative middle stage between the two. The Story of Kullervo is the missing link in the chain of transmission. It is the bridge by which Tolkien crossed from the Land of Heroes to Middle-earth. How he made that crossing, and what he took with him are the subjects of my discussion.

Tolkien first read Kalevala in the English translation of W.F. Kirby in 1911 when he was at King Edward’s School in Birmingham. Though the work itself made a powerful impression on him, Kirby’s translation got a mixed reaction. He referred to it as ‘Kirby’s poor translation’ (Letters, p. 214), yet observed that in some respects it was ‘funnier than the original’ (Letters, p. 87). Both opinions may have motivated him to borrow from the Exeter College library in November 1911 a copy of Eliot’s A Finnish Grammar, an effort to learn enough Finnish to read Kalevala in the original. Although both Carpenter (Bodleian Library MS Tolkien B 64/6, folio 1; Biography, p. 73) and Scull & Hammond (Chronology, p. 55; Guide, p. 440) date The Story of Kullervo to 1914, according to Tolkien’s own account it was some time in 1912 that he began the project. A 1955 letter to W.H. Auden dated his attempt to ‘reorganize some of the Kalevala, especially the tale of Kullervo the hapless, into a form of my own’ to ‘the Honour Mods period… Say 1912 to 1913’ (Letters, pp. 214–15).

Tolkien’s memory for dates is not always fully reliable. Witness his dating of The Lord of the Rings to ‘the years 1936 to 1949’ (The Lord of the Rings, Foreword to the Second edition, xv) when The Hobbit itself was not published until September of 1937, and The Lord of the Rings — begun as a sequel to and initially called ‘the new Hobbit’ — not launched until December of that year. And the letter to Auden citing 1912 to 1913 was written some forty-three years after the ‘period’ it referred to. Nevertheless, the two references to ‘Hon. Mods.’ (Honour Moderations — a set of written papers comprising the first of two examinations taken by a degree candidate) are explicit, and identify a specific phase and time in Tolkien’s education. He sat for his Honour Moderations at the end of February 1913 (Biography, p. 62). The Hon. Mods. ‘period’ would thus be the time leading up to that, at the latest January 1913 (during which time he was also re-wooing Edith and persuading her to marry him), and more probably also the later months of the preceding year, 1912. He was also at that time apparently in the early stages of inventing Qenya (Carl Hostetter, personal communication), and some of the story’s invented names, imitatively Finnish in shape and phonology, have also a noticeable resemblance to early Qenya vocabulary.

Such a convergence of extracurricular interests — teaching himself Finnish (albeit unsuccessfully), ‘reorganizing’ the tale of Kullervo, and inventing Qenya — would surely be enough to explain Tolkien’s confession in the above-cited letter to Auden that he ‘came very near having my exhibition [scholarship] taken off me if not being sent down’ (Letters, p. 214). Nevertheless, this first practical union of ‘lit. and lang.’ embodied the principle Tolkien was to spend the rest of his life upholding, his staunchly maintained belief that ‘Mythology is language and language is mythology’ (Tolkien On Fairy-Stories, p. 181), that the two are not opposing poles, but opposite sides of the same coin. This was a period in Tolkien’s life rich with discoveries that fuelled and fed each other. Much later he wrote to a reader of The Lord of the Rings, ‘It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that “legends” depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the “legends” which it conveys by tradition’ (Letters, p. 231). In the event, he did pass his Hon. Mods., though with a Second, not the hoped-for First, consequently did not have his exhibition taken off, and thankfully was not sent down, though he was persuaded to change from Classics to English Language and Literature. And in the long run it was legends and language that triumphed, for Kalevala and Finnish generated Qenya and The Story of Kullervo, and Tolkien’s Kullervo led to his Túrin, to the ‘Silmarillion’, and the ‘Silmarillion’ led by way of The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings.

Humphrey Carpenter’s dating of the manuscript to 1914 is probably based on Tolkien’s statement in the 1914 letter to Edith that [he was] ‘trying to turn one of the stories [of Kalevala] — which is really a very great story and most tragic — into a short story somewhat on the lines of Morris’ romances with chunks of poetry in between’ (Letters, p. 7). But the activity of a creative spark is hard to pin down. When and where and how does the impulse to tell a story begin? With an ‘I can do that’ moment while reading someone else’s text? With a mental light-bulb in the middle of the night? A note on the back of an envelope? A sentence scribbled on a napkin? Tolkien recognized the quotidian nature of inspiration, writing years later (1956), ‘I think a lot of this kind of work goes on at other (to say lower, deeper, or higher introduces a false gradation) levels, when one is saying how-do-you-do, or even “sleeping”’ (Letters, p. 231). In the case of The Story of Kullervo (unlike the opening of The Hobbit, by Tolkien’s own account written on the back of an exam) we will probably never know precisely.

Taking some time perhaps late in 1912 as the earliest possible starting date, and Carpenter’s 1914 as the terminus ad quem, we can see The Story of Kullervo as the work of a beginning writer. Whatever Tolkien’s immediate intent for the story, and whatever its contribution to his later work, it is best understood in retrospect as a trial piece, that of someone learning his craft and consciously imitating existing material. As Carpenter points out, and as Tolkien was at pains to acknowledge, the style is heavily indebted to William Morris, especially The House of the Wulfings, itself a stylistic mixture in which narrative prose gives frequent way to ‘chunks’ of poetic speech. Like its model, Tolkien’s story is deliberately antiquated, filled with poetic inversions — verbs before nouns, and archaisms — hath for has, doth for does, ‘him thought’ instead of ‘he thought’, ‘entreated’ in place of ‘treated’; as well as increasingly lengthy interpolations of spoken verse by various characters. Much of this style carries over to the earliest stories of Tolkien’s own mythology, such as ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’ in The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, and may well have been an influence on the rhythmic, chanted speech of Tom Bombadil.

When we fit this period into the whole arc of Tolkien’s creative life, a pattern emerges of successive stages of development, all of them showing the same interests and methods but each having its own individual character. It is important to our understanding that The Story of Kullervo was written by a very young man — twenty or so when he may have started, twenty-two at the most when he broke off; The Lord of the Rings by a man in middle life — his forties and fifties; and his last short story, Smith of Wootton Major (1964–7) by man in his early seventies. A similar arc of changes over time marks the revisions of the ‘Silmarillion’ material from the earliest phase of ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’ to the middle period of ‘Akallabêth’, ‘The Notion Club Papers’ and ‘The Fall of Númenor’ to the late and deeply philosophical meditations of the ‘Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth’ and ‘Laws and Customs Among the Eldar’.

The Story of Kullervo belongs firmly to the pre-‘Silmarillion’ period. All the evidence suggests that it was written before Tolkien’s service in France in 1916, and three years before the 1917–18 creative burst after his return from France that led to the earliest versions of the Great Tales. Yet though it lacks the markers of ‘The Shores of Faëry’ or ‘The Voyage of Éarendel’ — two poems from the same period which Tolkien later flagged as forerunners of his mythology — it should nevertheless be credited as an equally significant precursor of the greater work. Tolkien may not have had the ‘Silmarillion’ in mind when he wrote The Story of Kullervo, but he certainly had The Story of Kullervo in his head when he began the ‘Silmarillion’. This early narrative was an essential step in Tolkien’s progress as a writer. It contributed substantially to the 1917 ‘Turambar and the Foalókë’ and later versions of that story, as well as to the 1917 ‘Tale of Tinúviel’ and its later versions, for which it somewhat surprisingly provided a significant character. It was a creative pivot, swinging between its Kalevala source and the legendarium for which it was itself a source.

But what was it about this particular story that so powerfully called to him that he wrote it not once but several times? Perhaps thinking of its explicitly pagan orientation ‘when magic was yet new’, John Garth calls it ‘a strange story to have captured the imagination of a fervent Catholic’ (Tolkien and the Great War, p. 26). Tolkien clearly did not find it strange (‘great’ and ‘tragic’ were his adjectives), and seems to have felt no conflict with his Catholicism, which at that point was apparently not very ‘fervent’ anyway. Carpenter cites Tolkien’s acknowledgment that his first terms at Oxford ‘had passed “with practically none or very little practice of religion”’ (Biography, p. 58), and notes his ‘lapses of the previous year [1912]’ (ibid., p. 66). Connecting Tolkien’s attraction to the Kullervo story to his guardian-enforced separation from Edith, Garth proposes that its appeal may have lain ‘partly in the brew of maverick heroism, young romance, and despair’ (Tolkien and the Great War, p. 26). Without discounting Garth’s connection of the story to Tolkien’s immediate situation, it seems possible that the story of Kullervo also resonated deeply with the circumstances of his very early life. Kullervo’s description of himself as ‘fatherless beneath the heavens’ and ‘from the first without a mother’ (Kirby vol. 2, p. 101, ll. 59–60) cannot be overlooked, still less two cancelled lines of verse, stark and explicit, transferred unchanged from the Kirby Kalevala wherein Kullervo bewails his fate to one of the ‘chunks of poetry’ in Tolkien’s own story:

The fact that he first included and then crossed out these lines is significant. They may have been at once right on the mark and too close for comfort to the tragedy of his own life. Like Kullervo, Tolkien had lost first his father, and then his mother. When he was small (a child of four) his father died; when he was young (a boy of twelve but surely feeling ‘weak’ at the loss) his mother died suddenly and unexpectedly, from untreated diabetes.

Let us look at the narrative that Tolkien called ‘most tragic’. Strife between brothers leads to the killing of Kullervo’s father Kalervo by his uncle Untamo, who lays waste to his family home and abducts Kullervo’s unnamed mother, identified in the poem only as ‘one girl, and she was pregnant’ (Kirby vol. 2, p. 70, l. 71). Kullervo is born into captivity, and as an infant swears revenge on Untamo, who, after three attempts to kill the precocious boy plus the failure to get any work out of him, sells him as a bondslave to the smith Ilmarinen. The smith’s wife sets him to herding the cattle, but cruelly and deliberately bakes a stone into his bread. When he cuts into the bread, his knife, his only memento of his father, strikes the stone and the point breaks. Kullervo’s revenge is to enchant bears and wolves into the shape of cows and drive them into the barnyard at milking-time. When the smith’s wife tries to milk these bogus cattle they attack and kill her. Kullervo then flees, but being told by the Blue-robed Lady of the Forest that his family is alive, decides to go home, vowing again to kill Untamo. He is deflected from his vengeance by a chance encounter with a girl whom he either seduces or rapes (the story is equivocal on this point). Upon disclosing their parentage to each other, the two discover that they are brother and sister. In despair, the girl throws herself over a waterfall. Consumed with guilt, Kullervo fulfils his vengeance, returning to Untamo’s homestead to kill him and burn all his farm buildings, then asks his sword if it will kill him. The sword agrees, and Kullervo finds ‘the death he sought for’ (Kirby vol. 2, p. 125, l. 341).

I do not propose a one-to-one equation between Kullervo and Tolkien; nor do I claim autobiographical intent on Tolkien’s part. Parallels there certainly are, but Father Francis Morgan, Tolkien’s guardian, was no murderous Untamo (though he did separate John Ronald from the girl he loved). Beatrice Suffield, the aunt in whose care Tolkien and his brother were temporarily put after their mother died, was not the malicious and sadistic smith’s wife — though Carpenter notes that she was ‘deficient in affection’ (Biography, p. 33). Tolkien was neither a cowherd nor a magician, though he did become a writer of fantasy. Nor did he engage in revenge-killing or commit incest. And though unlike Kullervo he was not mistreated and abused, like Kullervo he was not in control of his own life. There was undeniably something in Kullervo’s story which touched him deeply and made him want to ‘reorganize [it] into a form of [his] own.’ And that something stayed viable as his legendarium took shape.

Garth is right about one thing, however. It is a ‘strange story’, as even a cursory synopsis shows: a perplexing jumble of loosely connected episodes in which people do inexplicable things for unexplained reasons or for the wrong reason or for no reason at all. With the exception of Kullervo, the characters are one-dimensional — the wicked uncle, the cruel foster-mother, the wronged girl; and Kullervo himself, while more fleshed-out, is an enigma both to himself and to those he meets. The story is not so strange, however, in Tolkien’s version, which carefully connects cause, effect, motivation, and outcome. Already a certain modus operandi is in place, the effort to adapt a traditional story to his own liking, to fill in the gaps in an existing story and tidy up the loose ends. The best-known example is The Hobbit, in which Bilbo’s theft of a cup from the dragon’s hoard is a hard-to-miss (for those who’ve read Beowulf) reworking of a problem passage in that poem where, because the manuscript is damaged, the text is full of holes, with words, phrases and whole lines missing or indecipherable, rendering the entire episode an unsolvable puzzle.

In Beowulf (lines 2214–2231) an unidentified man driven by unknown necessity creeps into the dragon’s lair and steals a cup, which wakens the dragon and leads to the final confrontation that ends in Beowulf’s death. Too much is missing for us to know anything more about the circumstances. Though he denied any conscious intent, Tolkien fills in the holes and answers the questions in a major scene in The Hobbit. The unknown thief is Bilbo, his necessity is to prove himself as a ‘burglar’, he steals the cup to demonstrate his prowess to Thorin and the dwarves, and flees up the tunnel, leaving behind him a wrathful Smaug who wreaks vengeance on Lake-town. Tolkien did much the same kind of thing, though more poetically, in his Sigurd and Gudrún poems, straightening out the tangle of Old Norse, Icelandic, and Germanic legends that make up the story of Sigurd and the Vólsungs (there are, for example — and for unexplained reasons — two Brynhilds, one a valkyrie, the other the very human daughter of King Buthli), and filling in the missing eight pages in the Eddic manuscript (for more on this see Tom Shippey’s discussion in his excellent review-article on The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún in Tolkien Studies, vol. VII).

Returning now to Kalevala and The Story of Kullervo let us consider what Tolkien chose to keep, what he left out, what he changed and how he changed it in this earliest attempt at re-writing myth. The major items include:

1. Kullervo’s family.

2. His sister.

3. His personality.

4. His dog.

5. His weapons.

6. His incest.

7. His ending.

I’ll finish with a brief look (brief because it will be obvious to anyone who has read The Silmarillion) at the effect this transitional piece had on his subsequent work, contributing episodes and characters, and deepening the emotional level of his legendarium.

First, Kullervo’s family. One of the problem points in the Kalevala story is that Kullervo has two families and becomes an orphan twice. His first family is destroyed by Untamo in the raid that captures Kullervo’s mother. The narrative is clear at this early point in the story that this is a near-complete massacre, leaving the newborn boy with no home, no father, and no living relatives besides his mother, who like him is a slave and of little help or support. It is thus confusing to most readers when much later in the story a second family in a different household turns up, before the incest but after Kullervo kills the smith’s wife. He is at that point told, to his and the reader’s surprise, that his family is alive. The thematic justification for this second appearance is that it gives him a set of relatives — another father and a new-found brother and sister — whose job is to tell him in elaborate verse how much they don’t care whether he lives or dies, thus reinforcing the feelings of alienation and rejection he’s already got from Untamo and the smith’s wife. The plot function is to provide Kullervo with a sister that he has never seen and so set the stage for the incest.

According to Domenico Comparetti, one of the earliest scholars to write on Kalevala, the two-family mix-up is the result of Lönnrot’s combining into one sequence several songs originally independent of one another. Comparetti pointed out that, ‘Kullervo’s finding his family at home after they have been killed by Untamo, is a contradiction that betrays the joining together of several runes’ (Comparetti, p. 148), runos not even from the same localities, and with differing variants (ibid., p. 145). The confusion is not unlike the two Brynhilds mix-up in the Völsung story. Lönnrot may have been juggling his material, but he had precedents. In these earlier versions, the hero’s name is not always Kullervo; in Ingria it is Turo or Tuirikkinen, in Archangel and Karelia it is Tuiretuinen (Comparetti, pp. 147–48). There is no hard evidence that Tolkien had read Comparetti, though it seems probable given his fascination with Kalevala, and his discussion in the two College talks of the geographical range of Lönnrot’s collecting is most likely drawn from Comparetti. But it was the effect of Kalevala ‘as is,’ not its history of composition or its component parts which so engaged Tolkien. His quote from George Dasent that, ‘We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled’ (The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, p. 120), was as applicable to Finnish mythology as to fairy-stories.

Tolkien ignored the bones, eliminating the second family altogether and giving the first family those extra children, an older brother and sister already in place before Untamo’s raid. Their mother, pregnant again at the time Untamo attacks, gives birth to twins after she is abducted by Untamo. These are a boy whom she names Kullervo, or ‘Wrath’, and a girl she names Wanōna, or ‘Weeping’. The pre- and post-Untamo sets of children are not close in either age or temperament, and the older set is hostile to the younger, paving the way for their later rejection of Kullervo. When he is sold into slavery his older brother and sister both tell him — in long lines of verse — how much they won’t miss him. His exile separates him both geographically and emotionally from his mother and sister, so that when he meets Wanōna again we can accept it as reasonable that he fails to recognize her.

Second, Kullervo’s relationship with his sister. In Kalevala he has none, and because of the two-family combination he meets her for the first time on the occasion of the incest. Tolkien considerably expands and complicates this relationship, building up the childhood closeness of the twins and emphasizing their alienation from their older siblings and their consequent reliance on one another. Kullervo and Wanōna spend more time with each other than with anyone else. They are neglected ‘wild’ children who roam the woodlands, their only friend the hound Musti, a dog with supernatural powers who acts as both companion and protector. When Kullervo is sold into slavery by Untamo, he is followed by Musti, but cut off from his family. He declares that he will miss no one but Wanōna, yet in his exile he forgets her entirely, and fails to recognize her when by accident they meet again, with fatal consequences.

Third, Kullervo’s personality and appearance. Again, in Kalevala there is none, or very little. His characteristics in the Finnish epic are precocious strength and an aptitude for magic. Barely three days old, he kicks his cradle to splinters. Set to rock an infant not long afterward, he breaks the baby’s bones, gouges out his eyes, and burns his cradle. In addition, he is apparently indestructible, for Untamo has three tries at killing him, first by drowning, next by burning, and finally by hanging. Nothing works. He survives the drowning and ‘measures the sea.’ He escapes the burning and plays in the ashes. He is found on the hanging tree carving pictures in the bark. Set to clear a field he creates a wasteland; told to build a fence he makes an impenetrable enclosure with no way in or out; assigned to threshing grain he reduces it to dust. No reason or motive, except that he was rocked too hard as a baby, is given for this extreme behavior. It’s just the way he is. You can’t take him anywhere. Rather oddly, he is also handsome and a bit of a dandy, described as having ‘finest locks of yellow colour’, ‘blue-dyed stockings’, and ‘shoes of best of leather.’

Tolkien’s Kullervo is equally strong, but far from handsome or fashionable. He is ‘swart’ and ‘ill-favoured and crooked’, low in stature, and ‘broad and ill knit and knotty and unrestrained and unsoftened.’ Yet we come to understand him and even feel sympathy for him. The big difference between Tolkien’s Kullervo and the one in Kalevala is that while their actions are the same (both do all the weird things I’ve described), Tolkien’s Kullervo is clearly marked and motivated by early trauma. He is scarred by his father’s murder and embittered by his and his mother’s enslavement and cruel treatment by Untamo. He grows crooked for lack of a mother’s care. Tolkien portrays him as sullen, resentful, angry, and alienated, close only to his sister Wanōna and the hound Musti. ‘No tender feelings would he let his heart cherish for his folk afar.’ He nurses grudges, he’s lonely and a loner, a perpetual outsider, one of those people forever on the fringe of society unable or unwilling to fit in. Among Tolkien’s many characters Kullervo stands out for his emotional and psychological complexity, exceeded only by an equivalent or greater complexity in his direct literary descendant, Túrin Turambar.

Fourth, his dog. There is no such supernatural animal as the great hound Musti in this part of Kalevala, though there is a back dog called Musti (which simply means ‘Blackie’ in Finnish) who after the second family has all died follows Kullervo into the forest to the place where he kills himself. In contrast, Tolkien’s Musti is a significant character in the story, and plays an active part in several episodes. He initially belongs to Kalervo, and on the occasion of Untamo’s raid, returns to the homestead to find it destroyed, his master killed and his wife, the lone survivor, captured. He follows her, but stays in the wild, where he becomes the friend and mentor of her two children Kullervo and Wanōna, and is associated with the dog of Tuoni, Lord of Death. Tolkien is tapping in to a standard mythological convention here, the connection between dogs and death and the underworld, which, although Musti is not the dog of Tuoni, nevertheless foreshadows by his presence the tragedy to come. While not of the underworld, Musti is described as ‘a dog of fell might and strength and of great knowledge’. He is a shape-changer and a practitioner of magic which he passes on to Kullervo, instructing him in ‘things darker and dimmer and farther back even… before their magic days’.

Musti becomes a kind of tutelary figure to Kullervo, and gives him magic talismans, three hairs from his coat with which to summon or invoke him in time of danger. These hairs save Kullervo from Untamo’s three attempts to kill him, explicitly with the first (drowning), by implication in the second (burning), and again explicitly in the third (hanging), where the narrative is unequivocal that ‘this magic that had saved Kullervo’s life was the last hair of Musti’. Musti’s magic is ‘about’ Kullervo from then on. Musti follows him when he is sold into slavery, and teaches him the magic that later enables him to use the wolves and bears to kill the smith’s wife. In Tolkien’s notes for the uncompleted ending of the story Musti reappears twice, once when he is killed in Kullervo’s raid on Untamo’s homestead, and at the scene of the suicide where Kullervo stumbles over the ‘body of dead Musti’.

Fifth, his weapons. Like his Kalevala counterpart, Tolkien’s Kullervo has both a knife and a sword. In Kalevala Kullervo laments the breaking of his knife, ‘this iron… heirloom from my father’ (Runo XXXIII ll. 92–93), and explains to the smith’s wife while she is being gnawed by bears and wolves that this is her punishment for causing him to break his knife. In Tolkien’s story the knife has a greater history. It is given to the infant Kullervo when his mother first tells him of the Death of Kalervo (capitalized as if it were a story in itself). It is described as ‘a great knife curiously wrought’ that his mother had ‘caught from the wall’ when Untamo descended on the homestead, but had no chance to use, so swift was the attack. The knife has a name, Sikki, and is instrumental (together with the hair of Musti) in saving Kullervo from being hanged. It is this knife with which the boy carves pictures on the tree, wolves and bears and a huge hound, as well as great fish said to be ‘Kalervo’s sign of old’. The breaking of his knife on the stone in the cake causes Kullervo to lament its loss in verse, addressing the knife by name, calling it his only comrade and ‘thou iron of Kalervo’. The sword makes its appearance late in the story, after Kullervo has met Wanōna again, and their tragedy has taken place. He takes the sword to kill Untamo, and makes it the willing instrument of his own death.

Sixth, the incest, which is the story’s emotional climax. As noted above, in Kalevala this episode is a conflation of disparate runos from the far east of Finland, from Ingria, Karelia, and Archangel, and featuring different heroes with different names. Lönnrot smoothed the edges and regularized the hero’s name to conform to the existing runos in his compilation. His Kullervo, on his way home after paying the taxes, accosts a succession of girls, inviting each into his sleigh. The third girl is the one who accepts, and theirs is a brief encounter quickly followed by the exchange of family information revealing the incest, and leading to her suicide. The scene is potentially tragic, but handled so quickly and tersely that it’s over almost before you know it.

Tolkien makes much more of the event, and builds up to it carefully. His Kullervo, after his murder by proxy of the smith’s wife, and while on the run and on his way to settle his score with Untamo, is met by the mysterious Lady of the Forest, who tells him the path he should follow and counsels him to avoid the wooded mountain, where ‘ill will find him’. Of course he ignores her advice, and goes to ‘drink the sunlight’ on the mountain. Here, in a clearing on the mountain he sees a maiden who tells him she is ‘lost in the evil woods’. At sight of her he forgets his quest, and asks her to be his ‘comrade.’ She is frightened, telling him that ‘Death walketh with thee’, and ‘Little does thy look consort with maidens’. Angry that she has made fun of his ugliness and hurt that she has rejected him, he pursues her through the woods and carries her off. Though at first she rejects his advances, she does not long resist him, and they live together in apparent happiness in the wild until the fatal day when she asks him to tell her who his kinfolk are.

His reply that he is the son of Kalervo is the revelation that leads to her realization that she and her lover are brother and sister. In Tolkien’s treatment it becomes one of the most dramatic moments in the story, for Tolkien so manages the scene that the reader realizes the truth before Kullervo does. The maiden says no word of her discovery but stands gazing at him ‘with outstretched hand’, crying out that her path has led her ‘deeper deeper into darkness/ Deeper deeper into sorrow/ Into woe and into horror… For I go in dark and terror/ Down to Tuoni to the River.’ Running away from Kullervo ‘like a shivering ray of light in the dawn light’ she comes to the waterfall and throws herself over the brink. But this is all we are told about her at this point. Though she recounts her own story, she does not reveal her parentage. Nor does Tolkien reveal it directly, letting her subsequent suicide and Kullervo’s awakened memory, his ‘old knowledge’ of her speech and manner and the violence of her reaction underscore without explaining the tragedy of the situation. Only at the end of the story is Kullervo made to understand who she is and realize what he has done.

Sixth and last, the ending. Lönnrot’s conflated and ill-assorted version takes Kullervo back to his second family, then to war against Untamo, then home to find that all his second family are now dead, and finally to his decision to end his life by asking his sword if it is willing to kill him. It is and it does and he dies, still alienated, isolated and alone. Tolkien left his version unfinished, breaking it off at the point where Kullervo, horrified in dawning suspicion of who the maiden is, and witness to her suicide, takes his sword and rushes blindly into the dark. But Tolkien had the end in mind, and a clear sense of how he wanted to treat it. Jotted outline notes have Kullervo go back to Untamo’s home, kill him and lay it waste, then be visited in a dream by his mother’s ghost who says that she has met her daughter in the underworld and confirms that she is the maiden who killed herself. It seems clear that Tolkien intended this to be the delayed moment of dyscatastrophe from which there is no upward turn, the hitherto-withheld information that he has violated his sister. Waking in terror from this overload of shame and sorrow, the anguished Kullervo rushes into the woods wailing ‘Kivutar’ (an alternate name for his sister), and comes to the glade where they first met. It is here that he asks his sword if it will kill him. It is more than willing, and he dies on its point.

Both Tolkien’s re-working of his source and his story’s relation to his subsequent work are clear. His Kullervo is the hinge between the rather weird Kullervo of Kalevala and the tragic, mixed-up Túrin Turambar of the ‘Silmarillion’, providing Túrin with all the family trauma, all the pent-up anger and resentment, all the negative emotions which fuel that character’s bad decisions and make him so memorable. The geeky misfit of Kalevala becomes the angry, alienated, grudge-nursing outsider of The Story of Kullervo, who in turn develops into the fuller, more psychologically developed, self-isolating figure of Túrin Turambar, clearly related to his precursors but given a more coherent world and clearer framework within which to act out his tragedy.

Tolkien smooths Kalevala’s awkward two-family structure into one family with several siblings and this in turn becomes the war-torn and disastrously reunited family of Túrin. The unknown and unnamed sister of Kalevala becomes Wanōna, ‘Weeping’, in The Story of Kullervo, Kullervo’s twin and companion in hardship, and Wanōna in turn contributes to both Túrin’s dearly loved and missed sister Lalaith, ‘Laughter’, and to the never-seen Niënor ‘Mourning’, who becomes Níniel, the ‘Tear-maiden’ whom he meets and marries, all-unknowing who she is. All these meanings are significant, but the one for Wanōna is an unmistakable precursor of the names for Túrin’s never-before-seen sister/wife. It is worth noting that in Tolkien’s outline for the story’s ending, his Kullervo cries out to his sister calling her Kivutar, ‘Pain’. In Kalevala Kivutar is the goddess of Pain and Suffering. While Edith was clearly wife, not sister, their teenage romance and subsequent enforced separation and what Tolkien called ‘the dreadful sufferings of our childhoods, from which we rescued one another’ (Letters, p. 421) are strong reminders of the loneliness of Kullervo and Wanōna as children, and of Kullervo’s anguish when she leaves him in death.

Kullervo’s knife Sikki, all that he has of his father, finds a prominent place in the Unfinished Tales version of the ‘Narn i Hin Húrin’, where ‘curiously wrought’ becomes ‘Elf-wrought’ and the knife, here not an heirloom but a birthday present, is given to Túrin on his eighth birthday by his father, who describes it as ‘a bitter blade’ (Unfinished Tales, p. 64). Túrin gives the knife to the serving-man, Sador, but later misses it and mourns its loss. It seems clear, however, that the knife is a tool rather than a weapon, unlike the grim and foreboding sword which becomes Kullervo’s death, or the one whose multiple identities, first as Anglachel then Gurthang, then Mormegil, give Túrin an equal identity and a name, and eventually take his life. However, as Richard West has pointed out, Tolkien developed the weapon ‘far beyond what he found in his Finnish source’, making it ‘an embodiment of the ill fate that besets the hero’ (Tolkien’s Legendarium, p.239).

Since the sword is the efficient cause of the hero’s death, it is worth comparing the three instances, first in Kalevala, then in The Story of Kullervo, last in the story of Túrin, which distinguish it from other swords belonging to other Tolkien heroes: the fact that it speaks and interacts with the hero. Here is the speech in Kalevala:

Here is The Story of Kullervo version that appears in Tolkien’s plot notes:

And here is the sword to Túrin in the version in The Silmarillion:

While there is not a great deal of difference among the three versions (though the second is reportage rather than direct speech), the last two are closer to one another than either is to the first. In place of the more general ‘guiltless flesh’ and ‘those who sinned not’ of the primary Kalevala source, the other two passages cite specific names of people whom the sword has killed, in Tolkien’s note associating wicked Untamo with wickeder Kullervo, and in The Silmarillion contrasting guilty Túrin with innocent Beleg and Brandir. Both of Tolkien’s swords are more judgmental, have more knowledge, more personality, and more dramatic impact than their Kalevala model. It is worth noting that in his essay ‘On “The Kalevala”’ Tolkien described the voice of Kullervo’s sword as that of ‘a cruel and cynical ruffian,’ foreshadowing the darker aspects he later gave to his own sword Anglachel in the story of Túrin.

An unexpected carry-over from this early story to the ‘Silmarillion’ material is the episode of Kullervo’s return, crying aloud his sister’s name, to the waterfall where she killed herself. It reappears in ‘Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin’ in Unfinished Tales, where it becomes a vivid, briefly-flashed moment in which Tuor and Voronwë at the Falls of Ivrin hear ‘a cry in the woods’ and glimpse ‘a tall Man, armed, clad in black, with a long sword drawn’ crying aloud in grief the name, ‘Ivrin, Faelivrin!’ Minimal explanation is given. ‘They knew not,’ says the narrative, ‘that… this was Túrin son of Húrin’ and never again ‘did the paths of those kinsmen [Tuor and Túrin]… draw together’ (Unfinished Tales, pp. 37–8). Curiously, Túrin’s anguish and loss is not for his sister/wife Níniel, as we might expect, but for Finduilas, the elf-maiden who loves him and for whose death he is somehow responsible. The intrusion of this moment into ‘The Story of Tuor’ is a clear borrowing from Tolkien’s note outline where Kullervo, returning to the falls where she has killed herself, cries aloud for ‘Kivutar’. In ‘The Story of Tuor’ it is grief witnessed from the outside by an audience ignorant of the circumstances and thus unable to comprehend the anguish and loss. The scene is disturbing, intentionally dislocated, an interlace gesture from one story to another. The fact that both stories gesture toward the even earlier story is eloquent testimony to the hold that Tolkien’s Kullervo had on his imagination.

The most surprising revelation is that Huan the Hound, the supernatural helper of Beren and Lúthien, did not spring fully formed from Tolkien’s brow, but has a clear forerunner in Musti. Musti is perhaps Tolkien’s most noteworthy addition to his Kalevala source, and Huan is, after Túrin himself, the clearest avatar carried over from the earlier story to the world of the legendarium. Talking (and helping) animals are not unknown in the world of Middle-earth. The fox (though he is an anomaly) in Book One of The Fellowship of the Ring, the talking thrush, and the raven Roäc son of Carc in The Hobbit, the eagles in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and the dog Garm from Farmer Giles are the best examples; that is unless you count talking dragons such as Smaug and Glaurung, who have solid precursors. Glaurung is plainly derived from the Fáfnir of the Poetic Edda, where Smaug and Farmer Giles’s Chrysophylax are comic examples, nearer in type to Kenneth Grahame’s Reluctant Dragon than to Icelandic mythology, and Garm belongs in that same parodic category.

Musti is a bit different; he is Tolkien’s best example of a particular fairy-tale archetype, the animal helper; a type that includes Puss-in-Boots, the talking horse Falada of the Grimms’ ‘The Goose-girl’, the Firebird in the story of Prince Ivan, The Little Humpbacked Horse, and various shape-changing bears and wolves in Norse and Icelandic folktales. In Tolkien’s own work, Beorn of The Hobbit comes close, but he is nearer in type to the shapechangers of the sagas than to the animals of fairy-tale, and his own animals, though they walk on their hind legs and wait table, are not magical helpers but mere circus performers. Huan is a far better representative of the archetype. Nevertheless, he does not derive immediately from his fairy-tale predecessors but is in direct descent from Musti, whose obvious inheritor he is. In both stories the loyal, supernatural hound is a powerful character in his own right, and in both stories the hound is a victim of his own loyalty, following the hero to his death in a climactic and violent episode late in the narrative.

The Story of Kullervo, then, was the fuse that ‘set the rocket off in story’ (Letters, p. 214) as Tolkien wrote to Auden. He was not exaggerating. This very early narrative, incomplete and derivative as it is, ignited his imagination and was his earliest prefigurement of some of the most memorable literary figures and moments in the ‘Silmarillion’. Moreover, it is not beyond conjecture that without the former, we might not have the latter, at least not in the form in which we know it. The hapless orphan, the unknown sister, the heirloom knife, the broken family and its psychological results, the forbidden love between lonely young people, the despair and self-destruction on the point of a sword, all transfer into ‘The Tale of the Children of Húrin’, not direct from Kalevala but filtered through The Story of Kullervo. We can now see where these elements came from, and how they got to be what they are. Most telling, paradoxically because perhaps least necessary, is the move from Musti to Huan — a figure almost unchanged save for his name. It seems clear that Tolkien found Musti simply too good to waste, and recycled him from the unfinished early story to the later and more fully realized fairytale context of the romance of Beren and Lúthien.

The Story of Kullervo was Tolkien’s earliest attempt at retelling — and in the process ‘reorganizing’ — an already-existing tale. As such, it occupies an important place in his canon. Furthermore, it is a significant step on the winding road from imitation to invention, a trial piece by the orphan boy, university undergraduate, returning soldier who loved Kalevala, resonated with Kullervo, and felt the lack of ‘something of the same sort that belonged to the English’.